Tuesday, June 6, 2017

In Russian North, Official Ethnic Discrimination Only Makes National Identities More Important

Paul
Goble

Staunton, June 6 – Russian officials
have fallen into a trap that many in other countries have as well. When they
discriminate, especially in violation of their country’s constitution and laws,
against members of particular ethnic communities, they only succeed in making
the identities of these communities not only stronger but often directed
against the state itself.

The Russian government has proposed
rules that would prevent anyone not a member of a numerically small people of
the Russian North from having fishing and hunting rights, a measure that might
seem designed to protect them from outsiders but that in fact subverts their
rights and the rights of others.

“As
residents of Russia have known for a long time,” Bednov writes, “the action of
any, even the most justice and vitally necessary laws is reduced to nothing,
neutralized or even entirely eliminated by administrative rulings and
instructions. And even the action of paragraphs of the Constitution are subject
to such ‘corrections.’”

The
latest such case involves fishing rights in the Far North. According to the draft
instruction, officials will not give fishing rights to any community there
living by traditional ways of life if any of the members of that community are
not full-blooded members of nationalities defined by the state as indigenous
numerically small peoples of the North.

“If in a
list of a Nenets community there are ethnic Russians, for example, Pomors or
Ust-Tsilems, and in the list of a Yukagir community, there are Yakuts (also indigenous
but not numerically small) … the community will be deprived of the right to exploit
the bio-resources of waterways.”

Three
outcomes are then possible, Bednov says. First, those who are not members of
the numerically small indigenous peoples could be expelled from the community.
Second, they could change their nationality – thus, a Pomor could declare
himself a Saam or a Yakut a Yukagir or Chukchi. And third, anyone married to “an
outsider” could get a divorce.

Officials
are presenting this measure as a defense of these communities, but in fact they
are just the reverse and they are reminiscent, the AfterEmpire portal writer
says, of ethnic discrimination of the kind found in “the Nuremberg race laws of
Hitlerite Germany,” where an ethnic German with a non-Aryan spouse would be
subjected to repression.

The most
likely outcome of the introduction of this new measure, he continues, will be
that ethnic Russians and other “’not numerically small’” peoples will begin to
reidentify as members of those groups that are on the list of numerically small
indigenous peoples, possibly making them too large to remain on it or
undermining the ethnic group itself.

Besides
being a violation of the Russian Constitution, such actions by officials and
the response of the population raise some interesting questions. “How will
government bureaucrats define whether a citizen belongs to the category of the
numerically small indigenous peoples or not? There is no ‘nationality’ line in
passports anymore.”

Will they
use language as the marker? But many indigenous peoples don’t speak their
national language. Or will they use some sort of “anthropological signs” and
measure the skulls of the peoples of the North to make sure that only they and
no one else gets to fish in the waters of the region.

The
Russian constitution bans such ethnic discrimination and makes clear that
communities given special rights because they engage in a traditional way of
life have them not because they are members of this or that nationality but
because of their economic activities.Thus an ethnic Russian who does so has as much right to that as any
Evenk.

Bednov
concludes his detailed analysis of what Moscow is planning to do by suggesting
that it is time to repeat the demand of dissidents in Soviet times: “Observe
your own Constitution! Although,” he says, he “fears that this will sound like the
latest voice crying in the desert of in this case in the tundra.”